Everyone needs a plan, right? We plan our day, we plan our weekend, we plan our Christmas break, we plan our next holiday. Whether we realise it or not, we do a lot of planning in our lives, some of which we follow through on while others we don’t. Someone once said, “Life is what happens when you are making other plans” which might be true but I prefer the line from an American quip who said “If you don’t know where you are going you’ll end up somewhere else”. Well, I’ve always been into planning and Julie and I make a great planning team.
Almost 25 years ago Julie and I came up with a plan that trumped all others. The plan was to travel the world in a four wheel drive vehicle with some sort of camper on top, following the sun from continent to continent, living the dream. We knew we had to wait until the kids had finished university and were independent of us, and there were other dependencies such as the strength of our marriage, our health and our finances but overall we thought this idea was completely doable even if it was somewhat ‘out there’.
Talk about ‘out there’, how about glaciers in the fjords near Seward Alaska?
If we were camping we thought the key to success in such a trip was to visit each continent in their respective summer months which would allow us to avoid cold winters and hopefully get more camper-friendly weather. This idea of ‘Follow the Sun’ started to take shape and worked out something like this:
- April to September – North America
- September to April – South America
- April to September – Europe
- September to April – Africa
- April to September – Middle East/Central Asia (this part was a bit fuzzy)
- September to April – Australia
In this way we would enjoy six summers in a row, more or less, over a three year period. Sounds fairly simple and straightforward, right? That’s our plan for Follow the Sun.
This plan would mean we would need to be totally self-sufficient and our truck/camper would be our home and our safety cocoon as well as our transport. We would have to ship it from continent to continent and deal with a mountain of paperwork involving vehicle importation, visas, vaccinations, insurance and everything else.
The third member of our team – Tramp – which is a fancy pop-up camper sitting on the flatbed of a big Ford F250
It also meant that we would be away from our family and friends for a very long period of time, something which both Julie and I agreed couldn’t possibly happen. So part of this plan was to allow time for us to return to Australia occasionally, even if for short visits. We told our family in Sydney that we would return home for three reasons – births, weddings and funerals – but we hoped they would be courteous enough to bunch these together so we could save on air fares. We thought that was only fair.
The ever-growing family clan, a strong home base to come back to
So now after all these years of having this big plan we are finally implementing it. There have been many difficult moments such as quitting our jobs, packing up our family home, saying good bye to our loved ones and cramming our lives into a couple of small bags. There have also been some challenges with choosing our truck and camper which will be the important third member of our team, but we’ve overcome all these. We know there will be many more bumps in the road but we will enjoy them or endure them as the case may be.